Blogging from emacs

I wrote a few months ago about how I post these
entries. It seems a lot harder than what I do for email.
I type one letter to set up whether I’m writing a new
mail, replying to the sender, or replying to all recipients, and
whether I want the contents of the message I’m replying to in the
reply. Then I write my reply, and press a couple of keys to
send it. All without ever leaving emacs, which is the editor
that’s in my fingers so I don’t have to think about what to do
to move the cursor or delete or reformat.

For a weblog entry, I can edit the actual text in emacs, but
then I have to paste it into my browser and add tags and categories

So a couple of days ago I was catching up on news reading, and there was a
bug reported about weblogger in the emacs help newsgroup, which
indicated that the poster, while hitting an irritating problem,
had gotten farther towards getting it to work than I had, so I
decided to try it again.

Again, I didn’t get anywhere, but I was energetic enough to
send an email someone, who pointed me at someone else, who
answered my initial questions quite calmly and pointed me at the
bug list and the mailing list that he’d set up some time ago.

So I’m basically doing some testing for the developer on a
platform (wordpress) that he doesn’t have easy access to, and I
believe that we’ll eventually get a program that I really want
to have, namely a direct interface between emacs and my blogs.

In this case, both wordpress and emacs are open source
software, and they both use a well-documented protocol, so there
aren’t any insuperable barriers to being able to write this
program that I wish I had — someone just needs to write, document,
test, and debug the code. I’m helping with the documenting and
testing; maybe I’ll at some point get into the debugging, although
I was involved in gnus for several years without ever really
touching the code.